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art deco poster history

Art Deco Posters
                             Design for the machine age

View all Art Deco Posters

Art Deco replaced Art Nouveau as the major international decorative style after World War I and continued to dominate until World War II. Art Deco represented a machine-age aesthetic, replacing Nouveau's flowing, floral motifs with streamlined, geometric designs that expressed the speed, power and scale of modern technology.

Design inspirations for Art Deco were many and diverse, from the modern art movements of Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism to ancient geometric design elements from the exotic cultures of Egypt, Assyria and Persia. Its precursors in poster art included the German Plakatstil, the Viennese Secession, the Deutscher Werkbund, and the Parisian fashion design revolution that had commenced in 1908.

The style received its name from the Decorative Arts Exposition of Paris in 1925.The Exposition marked the mature phase of Art Deco design, which had by that point become very popular and widely recognized. Simplification and abstraction were always hallmarks of Art Deco, although the soft elegance and exoticism of its early days yielded to a more muscular and forceful style in the 1930s. It was often called the "Cassandre Style" after its most famous artist, who enjoyed a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Cassandre’s sleek designs of towering ships and speeding trains are still considered to represent the pinnacle of Art Deco graphic design.

Otto Arpke
Deutsche Luft Hansa, 1926



Federico Seneca
Cacao Perugina, 1929